Besides, I couldn’t avoid feeling a vague and pointless responsibility for the lot of them. They were, as Zenta had assured me, good, decent Lettish girls. And they did want desperately to get out of Latvia and into America. We were so overburdened anyway that another ten girls couldn’t make things too much more difficult. Even if it did, there was something in the idea of liberating an entire gymnastic troupe that appealed to my sense of comedy.
“It could have been worse,” I assured Milan. “Suppose Sofija had belonged to the Bolshoi Ballet.”
He hadn’t thought it was funny.
Now I asked Lenja, or whoever she was, just how the troupe traveled from one engagement to another. There was a private bus reserved especially for their use, she assured me. A driver was provided whenever they had occasion to travel anywhere.
That made it simple. Sunday afternoon Milan and I left the girls with strict instructions to go nowhere and say nothing. Then we went to the garage, knocked the attendant over the head, tied him up, gagged him, locked him in an office, and stole the bus.
We loaded Minna and the Lettish girls into the bus an hour after sunset. I had managed to find a driver’s cap and jacket that fit me and I sat in front over the huge steering wheel and piloted the bus through narrow streets to the road to Tallinn. Milan sat directly behind me with Minna at his side. The back of the bus was filled with singing girls, the majority of whom knew only half the words to each song and sang them off-key. A merry group were we.
The bus was an old crate, and I was no bus driver. At first I found myself taking curves at the speed I’d have taken them in an ordinary automobile. This was a mistake – each time it happened, the singing in the rear of the bus was interrupted as the girls were tumbled unceremoniously from their seats. After a few miles I adjusted my driving to the vehicle, and we took it slow and steady into Tallinn. It was almost eleven o’clock when we entered the city. By ten minutes after eleven the bus was parked in a quiet lane just half a mile from the rendezvous point.
“Keep everyone here,” I told Milan. “I’ll check with Anders and make sure nothing has gone sour. And I’ll find out if he has room for fifteen.”
“And if not?”
“I think he will. But stay here and keep the girls quiet.”
“Of course.”
I touched Minna’s cheek. “You stay with Milan,” I told her. “I’ll be back for you as soon as I can. Be a good girl.”
“Yes,” she said.
I left the bus and walked quickly toward the rendezvous site. I approached from the east, skirting the side of the huge fenced industrial complex, dark and deserted now. I stayed close to the fence and moved quietly down toward the waters of the gulf.
It was hard to see in the darkness. But when I was close enough, I saw a sleek ship anchored at the water’s edge and I sighed heavily and relaxed.
And I crept a little closer and saw another larger ship alongside the first vessel, and a group of men in uniforms, and heard Anders’s voice, whining, and heard the crisp orders of the harbor police.
He had not betrayed us. But he had been betrayed himself, or else the harbor police had been after him for some time. It scarcely mattered. As I crouched there watching, Anders was marched off under guard and taken aboard the police vessel. The ship pulled away from the shore, and Anders’s own ship, manned by police, followed immediately after it. The two of them disappeared in the blackness of the night, bound for Tallinn Harbor.
Well, that tore it. For a long moment I did not move, did not even breathe. I had fourteen unsafe people sitting in a stolen bus with no place to go. We couldn’t return to Riga, we couldn’t possibly get through any borders in the bus – we were in trouble. The boat that should have carried us to Finland was gone. The sailor who should have captained that freedom ship was on his way to prison.
And we were going to hell in a haywagon.
We could just drive around in the bus, I thought. One bus, after all, looked rather like another. Or we could send the ten girls back to Riga – they might be safe there – and the rest of us could try to get out of the country in a stolen car. I didn’t see how it could work, but I didn’t see how anything else could work, either, and the longer I stayed where I was, the worse things were going to get. Sooner or later some bright-eyed cop would wonder why a bus was parked on a side street. I had to get back to the bus. I had to do something, anything.
So I retraced my steps, but not slowly now, not slowly at all, but hurriedly, scampering alongside the high wire fence, stumbling, regaining my balance, rushing onward, stumbling once more, brushing this time against the fence…
At which point all the sirens in the world began to wail hysterically.
Then everything happened. Searchlights mounted within the industrial complex suddenly sprang to life and focused upon me. Gates swung open, and a handful of armed men streamed forth from within, fanned out in a semicircle, then drew the semicircle close around me. Guns pointed at me. Flashlights flared in my face.
The leader of the group, a heavy, thick-necked Estonian with a machine pistol in his hand, approached me with fury in his eyes. I stood with my hands held high and my brain turned momentarily off.
“You,” he shouted. “What are you doing here? What is the meaning of this? Do you know where you are?”
And, from some far-off corner of my mind, the words of the Chief rushed in to haunt me. You wouldn’t miss a chance at the Colombian job unless it were something very big indeed. There’s a missile center outside of Tallinn. Is that part of it?
“Fool, I’m talking to you! Do you not know where you are?”
I had a fairly good idea.
The bells had stopped ringing, the sirens had ceased to wail, the searchlights were dim once again. And I was inside the gates of the missile complex, inside a large, high-ceilinged building of concrete block. Oil drums and complicated machinery lined the sides of the building, tables and desks were arranged in neat rows at the far end. Overhead, a maze of cables and beams crisscrossed the ceiling.
The same group of men stood around me in the same sort of semicircle. They had holstered their guns now. A quick pat-down had revealed to them that I was not armed, and so they were free to relax.
I, however, was not.
“You say that you are from Latvia.”
“Yes.”
“But you have no papers.”
“No.”
“No means of identification.”
“No.”
“And what were you doing here? Spying?”
“No. Just walking. I did not know of this center, I thought it was merely a closed factory-”
“You were walking in the middle of the night?”
“I wanted to walk down by the water.”
“In the middle of the night?”
“I was restless, I could not sleep.”
“You were perhaps spying?”
“No, never that.”
“Or planning sabotage?”
“Certainly not!”
“Or planning, perhaps, an illegal trip to Finland? Or to receive a shipment of illegal goods from Finland?”
“No.”
“It does not matter what you say to me,” my interrogator said. “My job is security here, that is all. If what you say is true, you have nothing to fear.”
I gave what was supposed to look like a nod of numb relief. The relief was false, the numbness true enough.
“The MVD has been informed. A detachment of their men will arrive shortly to take you away so that your story can be checked. If they release you for a fool or shoot you for a traitor, it is none of my affair. I have merely to guard you until they arrive.”